


The Giants of '32

by musamihi



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:49:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>June 7, 1832 dawns on a better end for Enjolras and his lieutenants - but victory has its complications, and some things will never change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress; Enjolras/Jehan, and eventual Enjolras/Grantaire.

"But I was there, you know!"

In the center of the room, surrounded by the clatter of forks and glasses, the shuffle and scrape of hurried waiters and chairs, at a little table with four prettily disdainful girls perched about him, Grantaire was telling his story again, puffing up like a laughing pigeon.

"You were not," one of the young ladies scoffed, leaning back in her chair, gathering her skirts in distaste.

"I say I was!" Grantaire plopped his elbows on the table with a lazy (and possibly an inebriated) grin. He was not a prideful man. He only told the story when asked, and always followed the script.

"You! Impossible. How many men did you kill?"

"Never fired a gun."

"How many wounds did you bandage, then?"

"Not a one."

"Well," interjected another, plump in the face and bright in the eye, eager to move on to the more romantic part of the tale. "What on earth were you doing, then?"

"Sleeping."

The table erupted into gleeful sounds, which Grantaire tolerated with his eternal good humor. "Sleeping!" they gasped, as thrilled to hear it this hundredth time as they had been at the first, laughing to each other, trading touches as freely as a little group of bathing sparrows. "Can you believe it!"

"And I'd have slept through it all, too - only late in the morning, in the middle of all the shouting and shooting, all of a sudden there was a terrible silence. I woke, and - well. You all know what happened."

But they were not about to let him stop there, of course. A flutter of hands, a little wine poured, some daintily sharp kicks dealt under the table, and he conceded defeat.

"All right," he continued, leaning confidentially across his empty plate. "Well, then. When I woke, I saw what I would have sworn was a vision, a spectre, a horrible dream - I thought the wine had really done me in. It was Enjolras, cool and collected as if he had just been taking his coffee - a little rumpled, it's true, his collar flying open like great, glorious wings, his hair falling all out of place -"

There was a sigh.

"- But spotless nonetheless, white as snow, staring down a group of steely, bristle-faced Guards, nothing but the useless half of a broken rifle in his hand. No one said a word, least of all me. I thought I would die. And one of the Guards said, at length: 'This is the one they call Apollo.'"

The scornful coquetry had quite evaporated, replaced by four rather dreamy gazes tending, at least, in Grantaire's direction, but passing through him without so much as stopping for a greeting.

"And so they all took aim, I don't know how many weapons, eight, ten, it might have been a hundred, leveled at his chest. They asked, 'Do you want a blindfold?' He refused it. They asked, 'Was it you who killed Captain Marin?' He owned to it. So." Grantaire paused, probably not for dramatic effect. He seemed genuinely moved. "There wasn't much more to be said about that, as you can see. And I couldn't stay seated any longer. I stood up, steady as anything, perfectly sober - and walked to his side. And I said, 'Vive la République! I belong to it. So kill us both as one.'"

"I don't believe you."

"Citoyenne," Grantaire replied with a patient gravity that might have led one to believe that he had encountered such skepticism before, "you may ask him yourself."

"Oh, yes, the next time I'm invited to speak to the Assembly."

"I ought to get him to sign a paper I can show around," the storyteller muttered. "May I continue?" Assent forthcoming, he forged onwards. "Anyhow. I walked to his side, I stood against the wall with him, I looked at him. I asked: 'Will you permit it?' And he took my hand with a smile, bless him. I would happily have ended myself right then and there. But in that instant, there was a deafening crash, and splinters and smoke and bits of brick and glass went shooting everywhere. We fell to the floor, I threw my arm over Enjolras's head - which is why that Grecian profile of his can still stare, intact, avengingly out at the gallery, not that anyone ever thanks me for it. _I_ sustained a very impressive scar on my leg, if anyone cares to see -"

"Oh, get on with it!"

"No? Well. - Later, hm? At any rate, when we stood again, we turned around - and the wall that would have caught all those bullets meant for us was absolutely disappeared. The Guards who would have been our executioners had turned away, gathered around one of their fellows, probably bleeding as much as I was. When we looked out into the street we saw the mouth of a cannon, surrounded by more of those blasted uniforms. Enjolras looked to me, serious as the grave, and took my hand again. We thought for sure we had only traded one ball for another. But then the most wonderful thing happened. The captain of the gun climbed up on its frame, and shouted -"

"It was General Aimery, declaring the Turn! We know what he said, we don't need your recollection -"

" _If_ you will let me finish. It was indeed General Aimery, then-captain Aimery of the National Guard, rallying his men to the cause of freedom, his heart having been turned the day before by the soaring words of our honorable laureate, who had been captured and slated for death. But Citoyen Prouvaire's inspired speeches, his very skilled tongue, had saved him; and the warning shot of our Republic, that saved myself and Enjolras, was fired because of his stoicism, his divine passion -"

That was enough, really. Jehan couldn't stand by and listen anymore. "Grantaire. I think that will do."

"Jehan!" He was met with a grin, and four - he flattered himself - very pleased feminine exclamations. "How long have you been lurking there?"

"Long enough to know you do us all justice, and more." He took a chair from one of the adjoining tables, and established himself between a brown-eyed Leucippe and the girl who thought so little of Grantaire. "And, as usual, you exaggerate my talent greatly."

"Oh, bah. You prove it every week. We never fail to read you the minute you're published - the whole place goes quiet as the opera, _quieter_ \- Elise gave your last ode a breathless public reading from this very table, didn't you, Elise?"

Jehan gave Elise a very tender smile, and she blushed roses.

"When's your next, Oedipus?" asked Grantaire, resigned as always to forfeiting the attention of the fairer sex.

"As soon as it's approved, of course, you'll see it in ink."

"Of course. Where _is_ that charming editor of yours, that most demanding of muses, the righteous censor himself?"

"Citoyen Enjolras is in session this afternoon."

"And does your inspiration travel in his pocket, too? Or just your right to publish it?"

Jehan smiled again at Elise - pretty girl, with the white and simple face of a cheerful peasant - and helped himself to a sip of her coffee. "I could scribble a little," he conceded, standing. "Good afternoon, citoyennes - mes demoiselles." He gave a bow, and Grantaire tutted at him, gathering his coat.

"Don't let Himself hear you saying such things, or you'll lose your laurels in a heartbeat." Grantaire donned his hat momentarily to doff it to the ladies, took Jehan by the arm, and led him out into the street. "La Tombe?"

"They have the most uncomfortable chairs."

"Talent - so very _nice_ about everything. Les Trois Piques?"

"Perfect."

And so ten minutes later Jehan was lounging back in an old leather armchair, as cracked and brown as a dry riverbed, a small cup of what he knew would be the first of several gritty coffees tottering on a saucer at his knee. Revolution had changed everything; but some parts of Paris were eternal.

He watched Grantaire decant his first glass of wine - first here, not first of the day. He drank for free, most places, and while it hadn't done him any good, it hadn't harmed him half as much as Jehan had expected. A little pride could certainly be healthy. "It's hardly three in the afternoon."

"But a _cold_ three, you will admit. You're still young, coffee heats you up; but I need something that will warm my bones, not just my stomach." Grantaire swirled his glass with a look of satisfaction, raised it, and declared: "To lovers."

"To lovers." Down to business, then. Jehan sipped the yellow film off the top of his coffee. "Where did we leave them last time?"

Grantaire set his glass down on the arm of his chair and pulled a journal from his coat pocket. He consulted a few pages. "Mademoiselle is sitting on a garden bench, perfectly rigid with fear, desperately trying to convince her hapless father that she only desires a little solitude. Monsieur is hiding in the garden shed."

"We shall have to name them, soon."

"What - has your taste for allegory dried up?"

"It has its place. But I can accomplish that on my own."

"And nothing else, these days. I don't remember the last sonnet you spat out. Your melody is beautiful, Jehan, but keep repeating it and you'll drive everyone completely mad."

Jehan only clicked his tongue. "Monsieur-in-the-shed must sneeze and be discovered."

Grantaire looked at him as though he had gone completely mad himself. "So soon? Why, they've hardly met - and the father suspects nothing! Monsieur must certainly be discovered, but not until the moment can go off like a cannon - not this little pop-gun you have in mind. If he's found now, the girl will be able to explain him away perfectly effortlessly. An intruder, a thief! And then, the next time he's seen, why, Papa will know something's up for sure. You destroy _all_ the suspense."

"And you are too strongly moored to convention. Allow me to show you." Jehan held out his hand, and was ceded the notebook. Grantaire put his heels up on the table, lit a cigarette, and began to chat with a man slouched on an adjacent bench. Jehan descended happily into frivolity, an innocent, simple realm not untouched by philosophy, by politics, by high ideals - but never coming face to face with them, borne along in the wake of progress like a peaceful, remote vessel, never suffering the first breaking impact of a shattering wave. A world that knew turbulence, certainly, and could not be sheltered from it, but that only ever felt its tremors when they touched the domestic, the home of the heart. A selfish, narrow place, in some ways. But a good one.

_"Father," she exclaimed, her eyes glistening with a secret joy that - so soon! - must be snatched from the reach of her young hands, "I beg you - let me be, father, for I must pray!" Her fingertips fluttered nervously over her muslin-covered knees. Her poor Monsieur must not be discovered, or surely her heart wold stop its frantic, happy beating once and for all!_

_"Pray!" The old man's stern brow furrowed in worry. "My child, whatever for? What distress has visited you?"_

_Ah! But her father could not know that what had visited her was not distress, no, but rather pure felicity, true love - an angel._

_An angel!_

_Mademoiselle was clever, a dangerous and wonderful thing in a young girl. Her fresh lips composed themselves in a serene smile, and she scolded her father not unkindly: "Why, father, no distress is required to pray. M. le curé has just been telling me the most wonderful sermon on the Beatitudes, and I was so moved that I was forced to rush to the privacy of this, my little grove, where none but the good God should hear my tearful devotion - although I fear I have left M. le curé quite alone in the shed in the meanwhile, in search of a trowel."_

_The ingenious girl's father was struck dumb. He hardly knew where to begin. "M. le curé?" he shouted, looking about. "M. le curé, Father Lambert, here? Impossible! He surely would have announced himself to me!"_

_"Oh, no, father. For_ this _M. le curé is only passing through town on the way to his very first parish, come from the seminary at Caen. He saw me cutting flowers from the road, and begged from me a cup of water, for he was very thirsty."_

_"And he is in the shed!"_

_"Oh, yes, father, for once I gave him to drink he insisted on repaying my kindness by helping me in the garden. He knows so very much about gardening. - Oh, M. le curé!" Mademoiselle, determined not to give her father even a moment to gather his wits, drew her skirts about her, leapt from the bench, and ran towards the shed. "M. le curé, do come out of there, I've been so terribly rude to leave you so!"_

Satisfied with this next twist in the plot, Jehan gave the notebook back to Grantaire, and returned to his coffee.

Grantaire laughed. "Well! Monsieur has gotten himself into more than he bargained for. I've _never_ met a girl's father. But, as he has no collar, the old man will smoke him instantly."

"Make it winter, then. He'll be wearing a heavy coat, and no one will be the wiser."

"But then, Mademoiselle won't be cutting flowers in the winter. And that's no time for courtship, Oedipius."

Jehan gave a dismissive wave. These were all minor details, and would be accounted for later on, with no very great difficulty. Grantaire needed to learn to see the beauty of the whole.

But their lovers were destined to wait, it seemed. A very brief but very pronounced hush blew through the front of the coffee shop, like an errant wind followed through an unguarded doorway by whispering leaves. Grantaire looked up form his assiduous editing, clapped the journal shut, and stood with his glass in hand, beaming. "Why, Himself! Welcome, welcome!" And Jehan prepared to be dragged from his beloved, gently bobbing little boat into the frigid, heaving ocean of the State.

It was indeed Enjolras, quite like a threatening sky in his trim grey coat and billowing white cravat. His eyes always spoke of good, clear weather to the uninitiated observer, but Jehan knew that shade of blue better now as the one left behind by lightning bolts.

"Citoyen Grantaire," Enjolras replied, with that mixture of thoughtful respect and guarded irritation he now extended to his erstwhile comrade in arms. "I am pleased to see you. We hear your words so often in the Assembly, and I always wonder when you will find the time to come deliver them yourself."

Grantaire grinned and, leaving his chair that the new arrival might have somewhere to sit, fell on the nearby bench and drained his glass. "Well, you flatter me. But I'm no politician. It'd be highly irregular."

"I invite you. You will appear as my guest, since you are so often invoked in - connection with my proposals. You will appreciate the irony."

"And be torn to shreds a moment later, I expect, flayed by that razor tongue of yours -"

"Grantaire."

"- With no hope of recovery. I'm not a match for your rhetoric, Apollo. Who wouldn't side with that face of yours, when this is the alternative? I'd be doomed the very instant -"

"Grantaire!"

"- I stepped in. You'd beat me handily, just standing prettily to the side."

Enjolras's color heightened. Red sky, thought Jehan. "The Assembly is swayed by right and reason; I do not turn hearts and minds by being –" But here he faltered under his own steam, and Jehan found himself wondering if truly he would say _pretty_ , and wishing for it with less charity than might have been really Christian.

"Pretty?" Grantaire prompted with fiendish pleasure. It was remarkable how one man alone seemed to have the power to render him speechless. "Of course you don't. You do it by being fine, by being wonderful, I have always said so."

Jehan watched Enjolras (who was perfectly transparent) quash his violent vexation; remind himself that this man, this citizen, had taken his hand and faced death; and force himself to move along. His attention turned with mechanical precision to Jehan.

"Jean. We will have dinner in my rooms; I realize we had declared your latest submission completed, but I find I retain a number of reservations. I believe eight o'clock will be convenient."

Jehan was not at all surprised. "It's to be printed Monday," he pointed out, with hardly any hope of avoiding the impending murder of his youngest child.

"All the more reason to right the situation as quickly as possible. There is problematic language."

Grantaire snickered. "Ah, it's another page in the official record, is it? 'Freedom's light did shine sweetly upon the citizen deputies' glorious golden halos, as justice poured, jewel-like, clean and sparkling from the spring of the Speaker's lips -"

"Winecask! If you - !"

Jehan had his arm around Enjolras's very tense shoulders, and was turning him to the door before anything could get out of hand. "He only says these things for sport," he assured him, watching with a little disappointment as Enjolras went through the difficult process of remembering himself again, bringing himself once more down to the cold earth. "I'll be there at eight. Punctually, this time. I promise."

Enjolras stopped at the door, and turned to give Grantaire a stiff, polite adieu. Grantaire waved drunkenly. Enjolras sniffed.

"Eight o'clock, Jean."

"I know."

Citoyen Enjolras braced himself against the wind and disappeared into the street, and Jehan walked thoughtfully back to his soft chair, and his illicit refuge.


	2. Chapter 2

"Jean. Your sleeve."

Jehan lifted his arm off the table with a sigh, the sleeve of his coat heavy with soup. He pushed the bowl away, repositioned his notebook, and resumed reading aloud. 

Such things wouldn't have happened if it hadn't necessary to eat with one's coat on, of course. But Enjolras's windows were leaking, and his stove inexplicably empty. Perhaps it all had to do with the blanket he'd spotted, folded neatly at the end of a bench, in the desk-cluttered erstwhile drawing room in the east wing of the Tuileries that Enjolras kept for an office with some untold number of his colleagues. 

He was being stopped again.

"'Triumphal' is a word with history, I think you'll agree. Perhaps something more neutral. 'Victorious?'"

"The connotations are intentional." Jehan took the opportunity to finish his soup, lifting it unceremoniously to his lips. Eating with Enjolras had to be done in short, effective bursts, between long, dreary courses of words. "It's rather meant to evoke a march, a parade - it goes hand in hand with the description of the peaceful boulevards in the prior stanza."

"You might find some way to include it that doesn't make us out to be Rome, however."

"I thought we _liked_ -"

"The _Republic,_ Jean. The triumph will forever be associated with the brutality and excesses of the Empire. It calls to mind captured treasure, slaves, expensive public monuments."

Jehan rested his chin in his hand and stared at his empty wine glass, dutifully trying to think of a way to fit "victorious," or perhaps "procession," into this kind of meter. The trivial exercises to which he was reduced these days - they made him fidget. After a minute or so, he read the rearranged line, and received approval. But the next stanza's "travesty," "trapped," and other tr- words he had so carefully placed now hung about like lost kites or disembodied limbs. It depressed him.

"Very good. I believe that's all - write out a fine copy. You may use the desk, if you like."

"I'll do it here." Enjolras was always poking around at that desk; it was his office away from office. Jehan would have more privacy (whatever good that was to him) here at the table. "You know," he continued rashly, "Since we've straightened this out so soon before publishing, I think I'll take the extra time to work on something private - for the Literary Society, perhaps. I can have it quite finished by Tuesday - just a light sonnet, maybe - at which point my services would be once again at your disposal." He raised his empty glass to his lips to avoid looking directly into Enjolras's reaction. But he needn't have bothered - barely any was forthcoming.

"Your diligence has never concerned me, Jean. I know you'll always be able to produce something beautiful when asked, no matter the short the notice. And of course you may spend your time in other pursuits, so long as they don't involve publishing. You are the mouthpiece of the Republic, and as such all of your work will be interpreted in that -"

"I'll use a pen name."

Enjolras cast him a distasteful glance. "Why any honest man should want to compose anything requiring concealment of his identity, I –"

"It _wouldn't_ require concealment, if I weren't your mouthpiece! It would be a credit to myself, a gift to literature! I can't write odes and elegies and - and these _procedural_ epics for the rest of my life, I will stifle! Every week I see the journals passing me by, the papers with their serials, mountains of pages reminding me of what I'm capable of, but because I am your _mouthpiece_ -"

"You work under greater restrictions than do other men. Such is the price of honor. Your work is a credit to France, a gift to the People. And that will be enough."

Jehan watched him push his chair out and straighten up to clear the dinner plates. "And if it isn't?"

Enjolras stopped, his hand frozen around the stem of his glass, and looked down at him with - damn him - genuine surprise. Jehan read pain on those cuttingly crystalline features, but it made him feel only a little better. "Jean." Enjolras rested his empty hand on the back of his chair. "If you truly wish to leave your post ... Of course I won't stop you. You've given more than enough of yourself to the foundation, the glorification of our Republic. You've earned the right to a private existence. But I would beg you to think of the State you've served so well, the State that still profits so much from your talent. All the good you do would be sorely missed." Enjolras paused, and gripped the chair more tightly. His fingers looked as cold as bone or shell, bloodless and vice-like. "And I would miss you. Surely you know that."

Jehan searched that earnest, terrible face for traces of the man who lived behind it - or once had, not very long ago. Every so often he broke to the surface. But this - this being who would abandon him the moment he ceased to pour his very soul into the Cause ... How were they connected?

He didn't care to think on it. He picked up his pen again, and threw his gaze back down to the table. "Bring me a sheet of paper."

Only when he was finished copying, when Enjolras was safely settled at his desk, a nose's length from his candle, did he allow his mind to revisit the subject.

It had begun directly after the victory in Paris, when Jehan had been presented to the bodies of the friends he hadn't worked quickly enough to save, chief among them Combeferre and Feuilly, the two gentle creatures he'd loved most. He remembered very little of the following days; he'd been consumed by a terrible darkness of misery, a true fever of grief. He would have doubted that he'd been sensible at all, except that he remembered this room, that bed, that window open to catch the June breeze, and that man - yes, _that_ man, weeping together with him and showing him through the valley with impossible tenderness. Without him he must have died. He had loved him.

But just as his soul could never survive this conscription by the Assembly, he despaired now of his heart surviving this frigid union whose brittle glue seemed to be no more than - dreadful to say - philosophy, morals, _politics_. If Enjolras could send him away because he no longer devoted himself only to Government, then what was Enjolras devoted to? The laureate. Citoyen Prouvaire. Not the man he was when there was no quill in his hand.

Tears warmed his eyes, no great shock. They came to him more easily than to most men. In ordinary cases he relished them; they were inspiring. But this sorrow created in him nothing but fear and suffocation and weariness. The words on his fine copy appeared now to him as they truly were - blurred, meaningless symbols in ink. He was nowhere in this room; Enjolras had locked him out of it.

Some time later he heard Enjolras' chair scrape back, and he closed his eyes. The tears spilled over. He did nothing to hide them. Let him see, if he was able. There was a rustle of paper as Enjolrasdrew his work off the table.

"Excellent." The sheet crackled briefly. "I'm so glad we've agreed - I never enjoy going back and forth with you over words at one in the morning. I believe the haste shows through in the ultimate publication. When you are pleased with it ..."

Enjolras fell silent. A moment passed, and then his fingers, quite like ice, touched Jehan's face, leaving a thin, chilled wetness that made him shiver. 

Jehan opened his eyes and looked dully down at the vague, dark shape of Enjolras's shoe. He only wanted him to weep with him again, he thought. Nothing more.

Instead, Enjolras crouched down beside his chair, lay his hand in the crook of his arm, and smiled up at him.

"This," he said, with the serene depth of a shipwreck, "is _why_ you are the mouthpiece. You feel it all so purely, Jean, and I have never known another man who loved so well as you, so truly, without hesitation. Most men's tears must say what they cannot, but yours are transformed -" he gave that useless sheet of mangled scratching a wave - "into expressions that have saved France once, and will renew her again and again. I know the writing of it all exhausts you. I've kept you too long. Go to bed." He was so hopelessly blind.

"Enjolras -"

"I'll come with you." He raised himself up and touched his lips to Jehan's forehead, a blush of incongruous warmth. "It's already frosted outside - no night to sleep alone."

And that was how he came to stay another night, again and again - Enjolras was a beacon of hope that signified many things. Revolution for all, achieved; freedom for most, on its way; justice, near enough to taste; happiness, always just beyond the glowing horizon of his smile.

Jehan collapsed a few minutes later into Enjolras's small but well-appointed bed, and wrapped himself in his thick blankets. He was obliged to borrow something warm to sleep in. A faint smell of smoke drifted his way as the lamp was extinguished, and Enjolras, just as hopelessly bundled up, pressed in beside him. They embraced, and Jehan fell into a kind of melancholy trance as Enjolras's hands, gentle, deliberate, combed through the tired tangles of his hair.

In the dark, Jehan could make out the shine of his eyes, the shape of his mouth. "Go to sleep," it repeated, kindly.

But he would only wake up again to Himself, ready to march out the door and marshal a business-like breakfast. "I don't want to go to sleep." It was altogether too cold and lonely. Companionship in tears was beyond his reach, but Enjolras was a man of extremes, and ecstasy served just as well as pain to bare the human in him. Jehan didn't know how he survived the in between times without going mad.

"I thought you were tired."

"Only overwrought. I have too much in my heart to sleep."

"It's very cold, Jean."

"You'll be warm with me." His fingertips found Enjolras's mouth, soft, hot, loosely closed. "I love you." And that was true, in ways and at times. It would be true, very soon.

He felt Enjolras smile.

Soon his hands had pierced through the shrouds of wool and linen and everything else that covered him, and Enjolras's body felt as warm, as helpless and right as any other. The chest that rose and fell was nothing but smooth skin, a wall of surprisingly delicate flesh, and a heart that beat faster and faster with every passing minute - the statue, as Grantaire would have said, was animating.

\- How odd, that he should think of Grantaire. But perhaps it was fitting: Enjolras roused in anger and in pleasure was very much the same.

He said different things, of course. Jehan breathed a word into his ear, and the white, lithe figure turned its back to him, stretching gracefully from crown to toe, a peaceful tremor running through it all – the animated statue. Jehan held himself tightly against its back, circled his arm around it to touch its blind eyes, its open lips, that face pressed half into the pillow, tense at the cord of its neck, the shape of its chest, the flank, the strength of every part of it. And the moment they united, Enjolras began to speak of love in a language of air and sounds so much more beautiful and true than anything he ever used in speeches. Jehan was in love with him. He drew it on and on until he was compelled to stop, himself quite spent and Enjolras shaking with fatigue, on the verge of collapse, his voice reduced to quiet incoherence.

He fell asleep with Enjolras still wound up in his arms, praying that this time he might not escape.

\---

Enjolras had disappeared into himself by morning, of course. Jehan stood wrapped in his heavy green coat, face shielded with one of Enjolras's itchier scarves, miserable at seven in the morning in the freezing marketplace, watching his last night's beloved insist with hard-hearted politeness that he had paid for four sausages, not five, and that what's more he required no eggs. The place was teeming around them with stout people in drab clothing stopping in knots before tents, carts, stacks of boxes. The greasy old man with the griddle who was to serve out their breakfast began to speak about the state of his hens. Jehan drove his hands deep into his pockets and felt his stomach rumble.

A flashing arc of sudden gold turned his head to a stall further down the line. A girl with her hair half-covered in a china blue kerchief was setting out winter baskets of flowers, thick fans of dried goldenrod, lavender, cornflower. He wished he had borrowed Enjolras's coat, too; it usually had a few pennies stashed in odd places. No doubt he'd be granted a boutonniere free of charge, but where was the gallantry in that? A girl's flattered smile was always so much better than a gracious, admiring one –

He was interrupted in his by a harsh laugh, an arm around his shoulders, and half a loaf of bread prodding into his side. "You two! Why, you've lapped me - goodnight, Jehan, I'm off to bed."

"You good-for-nothing," Jehan answered fondly, freeing the bread from Grantaire's pocket and taking a grateful bite. 

Enjolras turned and handed Jehan his food, an extra sausage slipped quietly between his chunks of bread. "You've been hard at work, then," he said to Grantaire with a simple nod.

"You always expect the worst of people," Grantaire complained, reclaiming his baguette. "But Citoyen Enjolras is correct for once, I'm very much afraid. There's an editor ready to knock down my door at eight precisely, and I've been swilling coffee since we parted. No one sits on your lap while you're swilling coffee."

Jehan straightened his hair and scraped the scarf over his cheeks to redden them a little before tucking it neatly under his chin. "Grantaire, lend me a Napoleon."

"I would, but all I have are these three Dantons."

Enjolras made an angry choking sound around his breakfast.

"Any coin - more than that, now. Thanks." Jehan left Grantaire grinning sheepishly down at Enjolras, and went to buy himself a bouquet.

"Citoyenne." He made a dramatic bow. She smiled. "A bunch of your finest, if you please."

She began collecting flowers together, with no particular urgency. "For your young lady, citoyen?"

"For my bedroom, which currently lacks a muse. Have you any ribbon?"

"Red, and white. You'll take red, I expect." Her hands were adorably small, gloved in wool and deft and charming.

"Oh, yes."

She bound it all up very nicely; and when he leaned forward to slip her the coin, touching her wrist, she dropped a glorious bright spray of yellow tied with a generous white bow into his buttonhole. 

Then she cried out, "Ah - but you've given me too much." She thrust the coin back at him; he flipped her hand and kissed the back of it, his heart overflowing with resentment for sheep and all their works. And she treated him to a beautifully free smile.

"Spendthrift," she accused him gently, laying the flowers in his arms.

"Your name, citoyenne?"

"Louise."

"None in France shall ever forget it." He felt the need to take on a particular challenge, and convincing Enjolras to allow "Louise" into any verse of his would fit the bill nicely. 

He left her, feeling warm again, and walked with spry step to where Enjolras was still lecturing Grantaire on modern coin denominations. The latter looked as though he might happily fall asleep on the spot, as one hearing a lullaby.


End file.
